Since
this article was published, a a federal circuit court hearing date has
been set for May 17 in Philadelphia to hear oral arguments on appeals
by the prosecution and defense.

Twenty-five
years ago last December in the city of Philadelphia, Mumia Abu-Jamal
was shot,
arrested and beaten to within an inch of his life while in police
custody. When
he survived the cop assault, he was framed up, dragged through a racist
travesty of a trial and sentenced to die, for a murder he did not
commit. For a
quarter century, the former Black Panther and renowned radical
journalist has
been kept in isolation on Pennsylvania’s death row. The ruling class is
determined to silence the innocent man who has powerfully exposed their
crimes
and championed their victims, for which he became known as the “voice
of the
voiceless.”

After
a federal judge overturned Mumia’s death sentence in 2001 but upheld
his
conviction, both the defense and prosecution appealed the verdict. With
his
case before federal appeals court in Philadelphia, Mumia’s life is in
danger. A
panel of three judges could restore the death sentence at any time and
Democratic governor Ed Rendell, who was Philadelphia district attorney
at the
time of Jamal’s arrest and engineered the 1981 frame-up trial, has
pledged to
sign a third death warrant. Since the Supreme Court has repeatedly
refused to
hear Mumia’s appeals, the decision of the Philadelphia circuit court
could be
the final legal decision in this case. The Internationalist Group
urgently
calls to rekindle mass protests and particularly to bring out the power
of the
working class to abolish the racist death penalty and win freedom now
for
Mumia!

Over
the years, millions of people around the globe have taken up Mumia’s
cause. In
Europe, it has had a great echo due to revulsion at the barbaric death
penalty.
In 2003, the city of Paris named Mumia an honorary citizen, the first
time this
status had been bestowed since it was given to Pablo Picasso in 1971.
Last
April, the city of St-Denis, a working-class suburb of Paris, named a
street
Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal at the initiative of a multi-ethnic youth group.
This set
off a firestorm of denunciations in the United States. The Fraternal
Order of
Police (FOP), which says it is the largest cop organization in the
world, went
ballistic and got a bill introduced in the U.S. Congress condemning the
city of
St-Denis for honoring Mumia.

On
December 6, this resolution, HR 1082, written by a Pennsylvania
Republican who
was defeated in the last election and pushed by rabid right-wing
immigrant-basher
James Sensenbrenner, was rammed through the House of Representatives by
a vote
of 368-31. This lopsided vote gives a measure of the ruling-class
hatred of
Mumia. Voting against were members of the Congressional Black Caucus
and the
New York City delegation. Joining the racist lynch mob which “commends
all
police officers in the United States and throughout the world” were
House
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and liberal “antiwar” Rep. Denis
Kucinich.
Pelosi also announced that the Democratic-led Congress would continue
to vote
to fund the war on Iraq.

Three
days later, hundreds rallied in the streets of Philadelphia to support
Mumia
Abu-Jamal on the 25th anniversary of his arrest.

Mumia’s
persecutors are on a rampage. He was jailed and sentenced to die as
part of the
government’s war on the Black Panther Party (BPP). The state
assassinated no
less than 38 Panthers in its terrorist assault. Others died in jail. On
January
23, six former Panthers, ranging in age from 58 to 71, were arrested in
early-morning police raids, charged with a 1971 killing of a San
Francisco
policeman. The six are former Bay Area BPP organizers Richard Brown,
Richard
O’Neal, Francisco Torres, Ray Boudreaux, Hank Jones and Harold Taylor.
Several
of them were jailed in 2005 for refusing to testify in a grand jury
frame-up on
the same charges. In addition, two former New York Panthers who are
already
imprisoned on false charges of killing a New York policemen, Herman
Bell and
Jalil Muntaqin (Anthony Bottom), were indicted.

The
case against the “Panther 8” was built on “evidence” gained through
torturing a
group of 13 black activists arrested in New Orleans 34 years ago. A
press
release by the Center for Constitutional Rights notes, “In 1973, New
Orleans
police employed torture over the course of several days to obtain
information
from members of the Black Panthers who were stripped naked, beaten,
blindfolded, covered in blankets soaked with boiling water, and had
electric
probes placed on their genitals, among other methods. A court ruled in
1974
that both San Francisco and New Orleans police had engaged in torture
to
extract a confession, and a San Francisco judge dismissed charges
against three
men in 1975 based on that ruling.” The CCR compared this torture of
African Americans
in the U.S. with the “horrific” torture carried out by U.S. military
and
intelligence agencies in bases at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and
Guantánamo.

The
cops have also been on the warpath against Assata Shakur, who like
several of
the recently arrested former Panthers was part of the Black Liberation
Army
(BLA), an offshoot of the BPP. Shakur was wounded in a 1973 ambush by
state
troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike, and seized along with another BLA
supporter, Sundiata Acoli. Acoli has spent the last three decades in
jail, but
Shakur escaped from prison and has since been living in Havana under
the
protection of the Cuban government. Labeled a “cop killer,” like Mumia,
because
a state trooper was killed (by a police bullet) in the crossfire, even
though
she hadn’t touched a gun and was shot with her hands up, Assata Shakur
now has
a $1 million bounty on her head by the “Justice” Department. Ex-Panther
Kathleen Cleaver compared this to the bounty by the state of Maryland
on
Harriet Tubman in the 1850s for her work in organizing the “Underground
Railway” for escaped slaves.

Predictably,
the government labeled the former Panthers “domestic terrorists,”
linking them
to its “war on terror” whose purpose is to terrorize the world into
submission
to Washington’s dictates. This underscores the fact, as we have
repeatedly
insisted, that imperialist war invariably brings with it police-state
repression against the “enemy within.” After the 11 September 2001
attacks,
Arabs and those of Near Eastern and South Asian origin were particular
targets.
The net has since spread to undocumented workers from Mexico and Latin
America,
as the hated ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) police of the
Department
of Homeland Security round up hundreds at a time in factory raids. To
put a
stop to the raids, to end the decades-long war on the Panthers, what’s
needed
is sharp class struggle to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the
bosses’
war on workers, immigrants and minorities “at home.”

Many
of those protesting the glaring injustices in Mumia’s case have called
for a
new trial, presuming (or hoping) that the hounding of this courageous
fighter
against injustice was an aberration. It is not. The drive to carry out
a legal
lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal is not just another defense case. Many have
compared it to the trial and imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys in the
1930s,
which summed up racist “justice” under Jim Crow segregation in the
rural South.
Mumia has come to symbolize the oppression of blacks under police siege
in the
Northern ghettos, but more than that he embodies the persecution of
fighters
for black freedom throughout capitalist America. He is the
personification of
the struggle against the racist death penalty that goes back to the
chattel
slavery on which this country was founded.

Rio CUT labor
federation included demand for Mumia’s freedom in general strike
that November (right). Union banner also hails Zumbi, leader of
Brazilian escaped slaves in late 1600s, and João Cândido,
leader of 1910 revolt in Brazil’s navy against whipping of black
sailors.(Photo: Vanguarda
Operária)

The
relentless repression against Mumia is proof positive that there is no
justice
for the poor, blacks and all the oppressed in the capitalist courts.
This is
particularly true for those seen by the rulers as a revolutionary
threat to
their system of exploitation of modern-day wage slaves. The
Internationalist
Group and League for the Fourth International have called to mobilize
working-class action to demand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal. In April
1999, our
comrades of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil initiated a
statewide
work stoppage by the teachers union in Rio de Janeiro, carried out in
conjunction with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union which
shut
down U.S. West Coast ports, demanding that Mumia be freed. This was
only a
taste of the kind of class mobilization that will be necessary to win
freedom
for Jamal and put an end to the heinous system of state murder.

Already,
dozens of unions and hundreds of union activists and leaders have come
out in
defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal. This includes not only West Coast and East
Coast
(ILWU and ILA) dock workers locals, the 1199 SEIU Hospital Workers
union and
several transit workers locals, but also local labor bodies such as the
Alameda
County Central Labor Council in California. The San Francisco Labor
Council put
forward a resolution to the 1999 AFL-CIO convention for “a nationwide
day of
labor action to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.” But such motions, like the
multitude of
calls for union action against the draconian U.S.A. PATRIOT act, have
remained
a dead letter as the labor bureaucracy does everything to hogtie the
power of
the working class for fear that it could threaten the capitalist system
it
supports. Now more than ever, we call on working-class and union
militants and
all defenders of black, immigrant and democratic rights in general to
mobilize
the power of the working class to free Mumia now!

Mumia
Targeted in Government War on the Panthers

J. Edgar Hoover in May
1969. In 1968 memo, FBI chief threatened that blacks who “succumb
to revolutionary
teaching ... will be dead revolutionaries.” (Photo: AP)

At
4 a.m. on 9 December 1981, Mumia Abu-Jamal was shot in the chest by
Philadelphia police. By that time, he had been in the crosshairs of the
Philly
cops and of the Federal Bureau of Investigations – as well as U.S. Army
Military Intelligence, the Naval Investigative Service, the Air Force
Office of
Special Investigation and the U.S. Secret Service – for more than a
dozen
years, ever since he became a spokesman of the local Black Panther
Party at the
age of 15. In 1968, he was brutally beaten by racist thugs, including
Philadelphia police, at a demonstration against Dixiecrat
segregationist George
Wallace. The 700 pages of (heavily expurgated) documents on him later
turned
over to Mumia under the Freedom of Information Act show that by 1971,
Mumia was
placed on the FBI’s Security Index (of people considered a threat to
“national
security”) and in Category II of the Administrative Index (ADEX),
listing those
to be picked up and confined in concentration camps in a “national
emergency.”

Talking
of a “war” on the Black Panther Party by federal, state and local
governments
is no exaggeration. By the late 1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO (for
Counterintelligence Program) had decided to concentrate on black
radicals. A 4
March 1968 memo from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared: “The aim is
to track,
expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the
activities
of black nationalist organizations” (File 100-448006). Three weeks
later, on
March 25, Hoover instructed COINTELPRO to “prevent the coalition of
militant
black nationalist groups . . . prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who
could unify
and electrify the militant black nationalist movement . . . prevent the
long-range growth of militant black nationalist organizations
especially among
the youth.” The FBI chief went on:

“The Negro youth and
moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to
revolutionary
teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”

On
April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King, long a target of intensive FBI
surveillance,
was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee. The potential “messiah” gone,
Hoover
concentrated his fire on the Panthers, who he described in an interview
with
the New York Times (8 September 1968) as “the real long-range
threat to
American society.”

Hoover’s
vow to turn black radicals into “dead revolutionaries” was no idle
threat. In
his book, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (South
End
Press, 2004), adapted from his thesis for his Masters degree from
California
State University, which he obtained while on death row, Mumia Abu-Jamal
quotes
Attorney General John Mitchell, President Richard Nixon’s top cop and
hit man,
who swore to “wipe out the Black Panther Party by the end of 1969.”
Mumia
documents how the feds used sinister “brownmail” of anonymous letters
and
smears trying to set one group of Panthers against another, leader
against
leader, husband and wife against each other. He discusses several cases
of FBI
agents and provocateurs in the BPP and other black groups who tried to
instigate crazed terrorist plots and murdered Panthers.

These
government plants included members of the US (“United Slaves”)
organization of
Ron Karenga who as part of a US effort to gain control of the Black
Studies
Program at UCLA murdered L.A. Panther leaders Bunchy Carter and Jon
Huggins.
FBI fink George Sams in New Haven accused a new Panther, Alex Rackley,
of being
an informer and murdered him, then tried to pin the killing on BPP
chairman
Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins (whose husband Jon had been killed a
couple of
months earlier). Another government snitch, Louis Tackwood, set up a
1969 raid
on L.A. BPP offices; in Chicago, an FBI fink, William O’Neal, vainly
tried to
get Chicago Panther chairman Fred Hampton and Bobby Rush (now a U.S.
Congressman) to agree to a plot to bomb city hall. He provided the
floor plan
to facilitate the police/FBI raid in which Panthers Hampton and Mark
Clark were
slain.

In
Philadelphia, the policy of local police under chief Frank Rizzo of
having BPP
members “arrested on every possible charge until they could no longer
make
bail” was held up as a model in COINTELPRO directives. In August 1970,
Rizzo’s
racist cops raided the BPP offices and had the entire Panther
leadership
stripped naked and paraded on the streets to humiliate them. In Mumia’s
case,
the FBI repeatedly tried to set him up: once for having an Exacto knife
in his
pocket when he was arrested; on another occasion searching him for
weapons when
he flew to a BPP meeting on the West Coast. In 1973, they tried to
stick him
with the murder of the British governor of Bermuda using the fact that
the year
before Jamal had taken courses at Vermont’s Goddard College, “which
attracts
black extremists from Bermuda,” according to a letter by the acting
director of
the FBI. All these attempts failed.

Jamal
left the Panthers in 1970 as the BPP was falling apart in a split
(stoked by
FBI provocation) between the West Coast wing led by Huey Newton and
Bobby
Seale, which turned toward Democratic Party local politics, and the
East Coast
wing led by Eldridge Cleaver, who went into exile in Algeria.
COINTELPRO was
formally (but not actually) disbanded in 1974 after activists from
Swarthmore
College seized and publicized mountains of documents exposing the
massive
program of spying and provocation. In Philadelphia, Rizzo continued his
own
COINTELPRO operation, first as police chief from 1967 to 1972, and then
as
mayor during 1972-80, compiling files on 18,000 people. He ran the city
as a
mini-police state, subjecting the population – particularly black
people – to a
reign of unchecked cop power.

In
We Want Freedom, Mumia writes that Philadelphia “is
formally a northern
city, but as it virtually straddles the mythical Mason-Dixon line, it
is, in
many ways, a southern city as well.” Frank Rizzo ruled Philly “up
North” in
much the same way as Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor ran Birmingham,
Alabama “down
South.” In 1967, Rizzo set his cops on 3,000 students protesting at the
Board
of Education, yelling: “Get their black asses!” In 1978, he sent an
army of 600
police to assault a largely black Powelton Village commune of the MOVE
organization, followers of the back-to-nature philosophy of John Africa
who
upheld the right of self-defense. TV footage and front-page photos in
the Philadelphia
Inquirer showed police viciously stomping MOVE member Delbert
Africa in the
head. In the crossfire, a cop was killed, leading to the imprisonment
of 12
MOVE members, nine of whom are still behind bars 29 years later.

The
rulers of the misnamed “city of brotherly love” have long kept the
black and
Latino population down through unbridled police rule. In 1972, the
state
committee of the federal Civil Rights Commission called the
Philadelphia police
a “paramilitary institution,” which acted like “a law unto itself.”
Police
abuses in “Rizzotown” became so notorious in the late ’70s that the
federal
Justice Department began an investigation. The feds produced a list of
thousands of people, 271 pages of names, who had been beaten or shot by
the
police. Thelocal Bar Association
documented 299 killings by Philly cops during 1970-78 which they deemed
illegal. And this reign of cop terror continued after Rizzo was
replaced by a
black Democratic mayor, Wilson Goode. In May 1985, city police, with
Goode’s
approval, used C-4 explosives supplied by the FBI to firebomb a second
MOVE
commune, killing eleven black men, women and children, and burning down
the
whole Osage Avenue neighborhood in West Philadelphia.

After
having been targeted by the FBI and local police as a spokesman for the
Black
Panther Party at the age of 15, Mumia Abu-Jamal earned the hatred of
Rizzo and
Philly cops for his coverage of police abuse as a radio reporter,
particularly
over the 1978 Powelton Village siege. Meanwhile, the police department
was
thrown into turmoil by an unprecedented 1979 federal lawsuit over years
of
brutality and rampant corruption on the force. Police officials were
worried
about an informer in their ranks leaking information to the Justice
Department,
particularly about the Center City district where cops were deeply
involved in
prostitution and drug rackets. Years later, in 2001, it was revealed
that the
cops organized a mob hit to take out the suspected leaker, police
officer
Daniel Faulkner. When Jamal showed up on the sceneat 4 a.m. on 9 December 1981, seeing his brother, Billy
Cook,
staggering after being beaten by cops, the police saw their chance.
They shot
Mumia in the chest and then pinned the rubout of Faulkner on their
nemesis.

Liberal
Lawyers Betray Mumia

Philadelphia
is an extreme example of how oppressed racial/ethnic minorities are
ruled in
racist capitalist America. With slavery defeated by the 1860s Civil
War, and
Jim Crow segregation formally outlawed following the 1960s Civil Rights
Movement, across the country black ghettos and Latino barrios are
treated by
increasingly militarized police forces as occupied territories. Cops
use
“racial profiling” to “stop and frisk” dark-skinned people on the
streets or in
their cars: more than 500,000 people were searched by the New York
Police
Department last year alone, 85 percent of them blacks and Latinos. Vast
numbers
of minority youth are imprisoned (more than 2.1 million people are
currently in
jail across the country, a far higher percentage than in any other
economically
advanced country), then denied basic rights after release. Police hit
squads
murder “suspects” with abandon: a NYPD “street crime unit” gunned down
Amadou
Diallo with 41 shots in 1999 and the “club enforcement unit”
assassinated Sean
Bell with 50 shots in 2006.

The
drive to lynch Mumia Abu-Jamal has been a judicial horror show from the
start.
After Mumia was shot in the chest that December 9, police picked him up
and
rammed his head into a telephone pole. When the police wagon arrived at
Jefferson Hospital, the cops threw him to the ground and beat him
again. At the
hospital doors Mumia was subjected to a new beating. His real “crime”
in the
eyes of the police is that he survived the attempt to murder him in the
streets, so for the past 25 years they have been trying to lynch him in
the
courts. To accomplish this the government has fabricated a whole tissue
of
lies. “Mumia Abu-Jamal stood over Officer Faulkner and shot him in the
face,
mortally wounding him,” claims House Resolution 1082. False. This story
was
concocted by prosecutor Joseph McGill, the bullet casings on the
sidewalk do
not match the gun Jamal was licensed to carry as a taxi driver, the
bullet
removed from Faulkner’s body was a different caliber, the trajectory of
the
shot that killed the policeman is the opposite of someone standing over
him,
there were no divots (loose chips) in the sidewalk.

A
cop later claimed that Mumia “confessed” in the police wagon, but his
partner
reported that Mumia said nothing. Two months later, at a conference of
the
police with the district attorney, a story was invented about Jamal
“hollering”
a confession in the hospital corridor, but this is denied by the
physician, who
said the patient had lost too much blood to be able to say anything
loudly, and
another police officer reported that that Mumia “made no comments.”
None of
this was brought out at the 1982 trial, because the police claimed the
officer
was “not available” and Jamal’s incompetent lawyer didn’t subpoena him.
Witnesses on the scene were coerced by the police into saying that
Jamal shot
Faulkner. A main prosecution witness, a prostitute, Cynthia White, was
known to
“turn tricks” for the police. A second prostitute, Pamela Jenkins, who
was a
key government witness in the federal investigation into the 39th
Precinct
corruption scandal, reported the police pressure to perjure herself and
name
Jamal as the shooter.

A
third prostitute, Veronica Jones, said in a 1996 hearing that police
coerced
her into changing her account that she saw two men run from the scene;
when she
insisted on telling the truth about what happened, she was taken from
the stand
in handcuffs and jailed on an “outstanding warrant.” Another witness,
white cab
driver Robert Chobert, later recanted key elements of his original
testimony to
an investigator for Jamal’s defense team. His recantation was never
brought out
in court. Another eyewitness, taxi driver William Singletary, stated
flatly in
a deposition that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot Faulkner, that the
shooter was
a black male wearing a green army jacket who then fled the scene.
Altogether
five witnesses reported seeing a man in a green army jacket on the
scene,
several saying they saw him fleeing. (Jamal had on a red quilted ski
jacket
with a blue stripe.) Yet Singletary was never called to testify by the
prosecution or the defense, and others were not questioned about the
man in the
army jacket.

The
vital importance of this became clear when one Arnold Beverly, who had
previously told members of Jamal’s defense team that he knew who shot
the
police officer, finally admitted, in June 1999, in a sworn and
videotaped
deposition, that “Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting” and that
“I shot
Faulkner in the face at close range.” Beverly was wearing a green army
jacket
that night. His deposition gives a detailed account of the events, and
an
explanation of why Faulkner was killed:

“I was hired, along with
another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that
Faulkner was
a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with
the
graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including
prostitution,
gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.”

Several
witnesses reported seeing two men fleeing the scene. The second one was
quite
likely Kenneth Freeman, who had been in a car with Mumia’s brother,
Billy Cook.
Freeman, who was also wearing a green army jacket, later told Cook
about “a
plan to kill Faulkner. He told me that he was armed on that night and
participated in the shooting.”

The
Beverly confession is consistent with the facts in the case, unlike the
prosecution’s story which is riddled with holes and contradictions, and
also
clears up the motive for the shooting of the police officer. Yet
Jamal’s own
defense lawyers, Leonard Weinglass and Daniel Williams, refused to
present his
testimony. Nor did they call on Billy Cook to testify, nor did they ask
Singletary
about what he saw (in fact, lead attorney Weinglass undercut
Singletary’s
credibility), nor did they question Chobert about his recantation of
his
previous testimony. Why not? Because they refused to raise at any time
the
innocence of Mumia Abu-Jama or allow any testimony on this vital issue.
Rachel
Wolkenstein, counsel of the Partisan Defense Committee, who had
participated as
one of the attorneys in the defense team, had interviewed Singletary
and
Beverly and insisted to Weinglass and Williams that their testimony
must be
presented in the 1999 federal habeas corpus appeal. In an August 2001
affidavit, Wolkenstein reported:

“Co-counsel Williams
argued that if accepted, Beverly’s account would mean that police had
knowingly
framed an innocent man, and Williams asserted that it was
‘unbelievable’ that
police or the prosecution would do that.”

At
bottom, what was going on here was a battle over the fundamental issue
of the
capitalist state. In Rizzo’s Philadelphia, of all places, it is utterly
believable that the police and prosecution would frame up an innocent
man. They
did it all the time and everyone knew it. Even the federal government
sued the
Philly police department for its blatant corruption and systematic
violation of
rights. But as bourgeois liberals, Mumia’s then-attorneys Weinglass and
Williams refused to uphold his innocence, because to do so would go
beyond the
matter of strictly constitutional issues of law and inevitably point to
the
nature of the state as a machine for the suppression of the oppressed
in the
interests of the ruling class – and that they would not touch. On top
of this,
Williams published a vile “insider’s account” of the Mumia
defense,
Executing Justice (2001), in which he outrageously declared, “I
have no
idea whether Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent or guilty.” For this outright
treachery, Jamal rightly fired his backstabbing defense lawyers.

Mumia
Abu-Jamal’s new lawyers filed an amended appeal. As we wrote five years
ago:

“The credibility of the
charges brought in Jamal’s new appeal is not why his former attorneys
refused
to touch them. It was their credibility with the bourgeois legal system
they
didn’t want to jeopardize. While lawyers are pledged to defend the
interests of
their clients, a trust that Weinglass and Williams horrendously
betrayed as
they stabbed Mumia in the back, they are also sworn in as ‘officers of
the
court.’ They can be disbarred or refused the right to representation in
the courts,
as President Clinton has discovered. But more fundamentally, they are
an
integral part of the bourgeois ‘justice’ system, which defends the
interests of
the exploiters and oppressors by meting out injustice to the exploited
and
oppressed. To argue that Mumia was framed by the police, prosecutors
and courts
as well as by the FBI – as he was –would mean indicting the capitalist state. That they would
not do,
because like the whole layer of liberals, rad-libs and reformists who
only call
for a ‘new trial,’ Weinglass and Williams peddle the illusion that you
can get
justice in the courts. Bottom line: they support the state that is
hell-bent on
silencing Mumia Abu-Jamal forever.”

When
in December 2005, the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in
Philadelphia
agreed to consider three of the claims raised by Mumia in his federal
appeal,
liberals who had been calling for a new trial proclaimed this a huge
“victory.”
Yet the verdict of the court could well be to reinstate the death
penalty
lifted by U.S. District Court judge Yohn, for the three-judge panel is
also
hearing the prosecution’s appeal. Or the judges could order a new
sentencing
hearing, in the present reactionary political climate, in which
Democrats and
Republicans compete over who is tougher on “terrorism.” And if a new
death
sentence is handed down, there will be a fast track to execution.

The
counts that the judges agreed to hear concern, first, the grossly
racist jury-rigging
in the original trial, when the prosecution struck eleven black
potential
jurors on peremptory challenges, and the final jury had a single black
person,
in a city that is over 40 percent black. Second is the question of
judicial
bias in the 1995 state appeals hearing before the same Judge Albert
Sabo, the
notorious “hanging judge” who presided over the original 1982 trial.
Third is
the issue of Prosecutor McGill’s instructions to the jury, when he
argued for
conviction on the grounds that there would “appeal after appeal and
perhaps
there could be a reversal of the case, or whatever, so that may not be
final.”
Even on these issues, the full story won’t be heard. A court
stenographer,
Terri Maurer-Carter, revealed in 2001 that she overheard Sabo say of
Jamal,
“I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.” But her testimony is ruled out
because
it concerns the original trial, not the appeal. Nor will the videotape
be shown
where Philadelphia prosecutors were shown how to exclude black jurors.

What
won’t be considered at all includes:

The state’s manipulation of
eyewitnesses into changing their testimony to finger Jamal.

The state’s suppression of the
evidence of the shooter fleeing the scene.

The state’s use of a
fabricated “confession,” cooked up by the prosecutor and cops two
months later.

The state’s destruction of
crucial physical evidence, and keeping from the jury the fact the
medical
examiner’s report said Faulkner was shot by a bullet of a different
caliber
than Jamal’s gun.

The hundreds of pages of
documents showing longstanding police surveillance of and bias against
Jamal.

The denial of Jamal’s
constitutional right to representation by the multiple failures of his
defense
counsel at trial.

The trial court’s stripping of
Jamal’s right to defend himself.

The court’s denial of funds to
hire experts to pursue potential issues and witnesses.

The prosecution’s use of
Jamal’s affiliation with the Black Panther Party a decade earlier to
argue for
the death penalty.

Mumia
Abu-Jamal was sentenced to die because the government considered him a
revolutionary threat to the system. When Jamal rose in court to read a
statement protesting the guilty verdict, the judge let the prosecutor
“cross-examine” him about a 1970 newspaper interview in which he quoted
Mao
Zedong’s maxim, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Asked if he
believed that, Mumia responded: “I believe that America has proven that
quote
to be true.” He read from the rest of the interview to set the context,
coming shortly
after the police assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in
Chicago. But
the prosecution used this to claim that Jamal intended to kill a cop
“way back
then.” To combat this blatantly political frame-up, limiting the
defense to
points of constitutional law won’t do – it is necessary take on the
system that
vows to turn black radicals into “dead revolutionaries.”

All
Faith in the Power of the Masses, No Faith in the Capitalist Courts

Major
courtroom battles always lay bare the class nature of society, for the
judicial
system is part of the machinery of the ruling class to ensure its
domination.
The Dreyfus case in France at the turn of the 20th century, in which a
Jewish
officer was the victim of an anti-Semitic frame-up; the Sacco-Vanzetti
trial of
two anarchist workers, arrested in the post-World War I red scare and
executed
in 1927; the 1930s trial of the Scottsboro Boys, exposing lynch law
“justice”
in the South; the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg at
the
height of the post-WWII anti-Soviet Cold War spy hysteria – all of
these trials
had to be fought politically, for fundamental social forces were
involved. And
in each case there were sharp differences over the defense,
counterposing
revolutionary politics to the dead-end of reformist and liberal
legalism. Just
as the racist frame-up and drive to execute Mumia Abu-Jamal is no
aberration,
neither is the betrayal by his former attorneys, whose loyalty to the
bourgeoisie was greater than that to their client.

In
the 1920s, in the Sacco-Vanzetti trial alongside the defense committee
led by
the International Labor Defense (ILD), headed by James P. Cannon, the
founder
of American Trotskyism, and linked to the Communist Party, a second
defense
committee was organized by the pro-capitalist union hacks of the
American
Federation of Labor, who accused the CP of trying to get the defendants
killed
by demonstrating in the streets. In the Scottsboro case, the bourgeois
liberals
in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP)
likewise denounced the Communist-led defense for calling for worldwide
demonstrations on behalf of the nine black Alabama youths. In the
1950s, the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) refused to defend the Rosenbergs
from
McCarthyite witchhunting because they were accused of spying for the
Soviet
Union. And for years Amnesty International refused to defend Jamal
because
someone accused of killing a cop couldn’t be a “prisoner of
conscience.”

Port of
San Francisco stands empty and idle during 24 April 1999 work stoppage
that shut down ports along the U.S. West Coast demanding “Freedom for
Mumia!” This is a taste of the proletarian power that will be needed to
free this courageous champion of the oppressed and abolish the racist
death penalty. (Internationalist photo)

Revolutionary
Marxists are in favor of pursuing all legal avenues of defense against
state
repression in the capitalist courts. We do not object to Jamal’s
lawyers
seeking a new trial and making appeals to every available instance in
the
judicial system, so long as there is a forthright defense against the
repressors. But as communists we understand that the whole “justice”
system is
rigged against the poor, minority and working people for its job is to
defend
the interests of the ruling class against the victims of its system of
oppression and exploitation. It is no accident that the courts stand
behind the
cops, because they are all part of the backbone of the capitalist
state, which
is defended by the capitalist politicians, bourgeois liberals, the
bourgeoisie’s “labor lieutenants” and petty-bourgeois reformist
leftists alike.

ILWU
contingent in April 1999 march chanted: “An injury to one is an injury
to all, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” (Internationalist photo)

These
forces join together on the political platform of calling for a new
trial,
expressing the confidence (explicit or implicit) that Mumia could get a
fair shake
with a different judge. Social-democratic, Stalinist and
pseudo-Trotskyist
groups including Socialist Action, Workers World Party, International
Socialist
Organization, Revolutionary Communist Party and others all climbed on
the “new
trial” platform, appealing to the same liberal milieu that Mumia’s
former
lawyers were looking to when they argued that asserting Mumia’s
innocence would
not be “believable.” Now that the legal team has changed, the leftist
camp
followers try to combine calls to “free Mumia” with appeals for a “new
trial.”
Many of these same groups have in the past crossed the class line by
bringing
the courts into the labor movement, supporting suits against the unions
over
corruption in the case of groups like Teamsters for a Democratic Union
and
Miners for Democracy . This again shows their expectations of getting
justice
in the capitalist courts. Class-struggle union militants insist instead
that
“labor must clean its own house.”

As
did the International Labor Defense in the 1920s, we say that there can
be no
justice in the capitalist courts. Mumia’s 1982 trial was a racist
abomination,
his liberal lawyers sabotaged his 1995 appeal, and even if a new trial
were
granted by the appeals court, it would hardly be fair. To defend Mumia
it is
necessary to mobilize the power of the working class in the streets, in
the
workplace – in sharp struggle, not just with paper resolutions – so
that the
rulers fear for their own system. That may have an effect on the
courts, or the
rulers may be so dead-set on carrying out their state murder – as was
the case
with Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs – that they won’t be stopped
short
of a revolutionary upheaval. But in every case, the job of
revolutionaries is,
as Trotsky wrote in the founding program of the Fourth International:
“To face
reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call
things by
their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how
bitter it
may be.”

As
James Cannon wrote in response to labor fakers who criticized the ILD
during
the fight to save Sacco and Vanzetti:

“The Sacco-Vanzetti case
is no private monopoly, but an issue of the class struggle in which the
decisive word will be spoken by the masses who have made this fight
their
own.It is, therefore, necessary to
discuss openly the conflicting policies which are bound up with
different
objectives.

“One policy is the policy
of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest
movement of
the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of
the
masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While
favoring all
possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity,
demonstrations –
organized protest on a national and international scale. It calls for
unity and
solidarity of all workers on this burning issue, regardless of
conflicting
views on other questions. This is what has prevented the execution of
Sacco and
Vanzetti so far. Its goal is nothing less than their triumphant
vindication and
liberation.

“The other policy is the
policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous
illusions
about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal
proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle, it
shrinks from
the ‘vulgar and noisy’ demonstrations of the militant workers and
throws the
mud of slander on them….

“The conscious proletarian
elements with whom we identify ourselves unconditionally, are for the
first
policy. The bourgeois elements, and those influenced by them, are for
the
second.”

–James P. Cannon, “Who Can
Save Sacco and Vanzetti?” International Labor Defender, January
1927, in
Notebook of an Agitator (1958)

We
demand that the MOVE 9, the Panther 8, Sundiata Acoli and all former
Panthers
still behind bars be immediately released! Hands off Assata Shakur!
Mobilize
workers’ power to free Mumia NOW! n